Google and Yahoo Turf Wars Heat Up

Well, it’s no news that Yahoo, among others, is fighting for its life against the megalithic efforts of Google. The ink just dried on Google’s $3 billion buy of the Doubleclick ad network and they’ve officially announced a Powerpoint-clone program to join their already beefy hosted office software suite. They’re being innovative and aggressive enough that Microsoft has accused Google of becoming a monopoly. Which is not necessarily incorrect, just funny.

In a desperate fight for life, Yahoo has taken several aggressive initiatives of their own — notably, the so-far-successful new Panama ad-platform — and most recently, a push to extend their ad network into a variety of newspapers’ web sites and now a partnership with PayPal to add branded buttons to their sponsored search listings.

The water’s definitely starting to get hot, due in no small part to projections that spending on paid search is projected to increase by 17% this year. With more traditional advertisers catching on to the power (and impressive ROI) of paid search, the market is growing at an incredible rate and everyone wants part of Google’s enormous pie. Whether or not Google is becoming a monopoly, they are very steering the way of the web and have the technology, innovative people, and singular vision to do it. And for the moment, it’s forcing everyone else to try some interesting tricks to catch up.

See how Hall can help increase your demand.